Put Your Brain into the Blockchain – An Interview with Crystal Rose

At BlockShow Asia 2017 Cointelegraph had the opportunity to sit down with Crystal Rose, the Co-Founder and CEO of Sensay.

A coder since she was very young, Crystal has many insights into the world of Blockchain, artificial intelligence and a decentralized future.

How it all began

Cointelegraph: How did you start off your journey and how has it led you to sitting with us today?

Crystal Rose: I’ve been in technology my whole life, I started coding when I was eleven. I was taught through an AOL chatroom, anonymously, how to code html to start and I’ve learned more computer languages than human languages. My first company was a digital agency and from there I learned that social media was rocking the world and started a social media platform and I’ve since moved onto deeper technologies; machine learning and A.I. with a primary goal of connecting all of the world’s humans together.

Building a community: learn the basics

Today more than ever, it’s becoming easier to leverage technology and even build businesses on top of it without understanding the underlying protocols too deeply. We have so many companies building infrastructure that allow you to easily plug in. Certainly, the Internet is a great source for figuring things out and even trying it yourself. Coding is actually really easy so trying to use something open source from GitHub and do something for yourself for the first time gives you a lot of insight. One of my favorite things to do is have designers actually code their designs for the first time through front-end coding just to see how the process goes. I think in terms of Blockchain, it’s important to really talk to the people behind it. A lot of them are very accessible. Look at the Telegram groups or any other group that’s happening, the forums, and just really connect directly to the people. That’s the best way to learn.

CT: What is the number one thing needed to really grow this community in terms of consumers?

CR: Adoption in this space, while we’re moving really fast, is still very slow because it is very hard for consumers to use. We are somewhere around one percent of the total mobile population who are currently using digital currency, at least in known users. That is about fifty million, earlier this year it was about five mln. These are studies done by MIT and Cambridge and still it is extremely hard to quantify. I think the space is going to move incredibly fast as we’ve seen even this year alone. Yesterday Bitcoin hit over $10,000 and I think that is showing us that we certainly have traction and the system is going to keep moving forward. I’d like to see more people be able to adopt it faster so for the consumer applications that are out there; I think it’s important that more developers get on board with building bots. We at Sensay have an API that we’ve opened up, we’ve opened our entire underlying technology. We are moving from a centralized company to a decentralized company giving away all of the technology we’ve built over the last three years because we want to encourage more people to build on top of it so if more companies can open source, if more developers can come on board and if more consumers can start using the applications, we’re going to see the world radically transform in a very positive way.

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This is your brain on Blockchain

The human brain is really just a computer. It’s a data storage device, it’s hardware, we have inputs and outputs and eventually we will be looking at the brain like a node on a system. Every single human has a database of information on their shoulders that is like a warehouse and soon we can all connect. I like to talk about The Brain on the Blockchain because I think that there are things that you want an immutable record for and there are things that you really want to have as true information that is validated. Eventually, as nodes on a network, as we all connect together, we’ll have to have a system where we can have that kind of trust. So to me, that’s my passion now. I’ve always wanted to connect all of the humans and help them to become better and to level up and now we have that opportunity in a much bigger way with the combination of A.I. and Blockchain.

The White Paper Club

I have a repository of white papers. I am going to tell you something really geeky about myself. I am a part of the white paper club. The white paper club is like a book club. We get together for coffee and we read white papers because I think it is really important that people are understanding the ideas that are out there. I love the big visions. I think it’s amazing that we have so many huge visionaries. There are a lot of theoretical things but let’s not forget the white papers that existed a while ago. So I was just reading one recently for a product I really want it’s from 2006 and somebody wrote a white paper on a decentralized calendar application and that sounds super base-line. It’s a really really simple app, probably not something people want to run an ICO over but I think that the thing is that we don’t need a world of infrastructure and protocols. Eventually the infrastructure is going to get built. Eventually the roads will be there and eventually the buildings will be on top of those as well, so the developers who are working on things that are seemingly small, the applications of the future, please get everything decentralized. We need decentralized calendars and to-do lists. We need better email. I think if there is one ICO I really want to see and one I would put my coins down for today, it would be a better system of email communication.